Recovering "Yiddishland": Threshold Moments in American Literature (review)

Merle Bachman begins her book with a tender photograph of herself as a baby in the arms of her Yiddish-speaking grandmother. Bachman, a poet and English professor at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky, yearns to make contact with the lost language and culture of her immigrant forebears. In Recovering "Yiddishland," she aims "to evoke a felt past, a 'place' to which she feels attached by family circumstance and assigned ethnic identity; a place she feels it is her obligation, as well as her desire, to 'remember.'"

Bachman uses the work of several immigrant writers as her vehicle for exploring the contours of that "felt past"—New York's Jewish community, with its tenements, pushcarts, and cafes, between 1890 and 1930. Growing up, she'd been taught that Jewish immigrants had embraced assimilation without ambivalence, eager to divest themselves of all things Yiddish. But now, as she lingers at the threshold where these writers first encountered America, she finds evidence of a complex resistance to Americanization.

Bachman weaves colorful threads of personal, often poetic, reflection into her scholarly analysis. As she shares her close readings, we see her creating and inhabiting a "Yiddishland" of her own. The literary figures she studies become her restless soulmates as she comes to understand that even in its heyday, "Yiddishland" was always "a place neither home nor exile." So it is for Bachman herself—and for all of us who seek to connect ourselves to that once-vibrant world.

Exhibit A is Abraham Cahan's Yekl, the 1896 novel that inspired Joan Micklin Silver's film Hester Street (1975). Cahan was the influential founding editor of the Yiddish daily paper Forverts. Bachman shows how the comic tale of the swaggering Jake and his wife Gitl offers a surprisingly nuanced critique of assimilation.

Anzia Yezierska's novel Bread Givers, with its vivid picture of intergenerational conflict on the Lower East Side, has long been a beloved staple of Jewish and women's studies classes. Bachman examines Yezierska's lesser-known Hungry Hearts and Other Stories (1920), a collection peopled by "talkative immigrant women with unruly bodies." As Bachman observes these women's painful passage into the American mainstream, she calls herself a netorin, a seamstress whose goal is "to question the 'seamless' trajectory" from the Old World culture into the New.

A sense of "in-betweenness" also permeates Yiddish poems about the African-American experience, including several about lynching, by Roza Nevadovska, Alter Eselin, Levy Goldberg, Yehoash, and Berish Vaynshteyn. Bachman explores these writers' "complicated experiences as marginalized, would-be Americans who are perceived (and perceive themselves) as both white and 'other.'"

The book concludes with a look at modernist poets (such as Yankev Glatshteyn, Tsilye Dropkin, and, especially, Mikhl Likht) who knew English well but nevertheless chose, in the 1920s, to write in Yiddish for an ever-shrinking readership. Bachman sets herself the daunting task of translating Likht's 16-page experimental poem "Procession Three." If it's sometimes hard to keep up with Bachman on this final leg of her journey, she makes the going easier by bringing us close to the translation process. She lays bare her struggle with particularly difficult stanzas and introduces us to her circle of advisers—native speakers who are themselves sometimes confounded by Likht's nearly impenetrable oeuvre.

Jeffrey Shandler's Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (University of California, 2006) helped us to celebrate our modern-day experiences with Yiddish and yidishkeyt, rather than lamenting the impossibility of recapturing what once was. By the end of Recovering "Yiddishland," Bachman has succeeded in building herself a home in her grandmother's vanished world. Her book may encourage others to follow her example and put down roots in "Yiddishlands" of their own.